The Oneida Nation supported the Americans in the War for Independence, an alliance that would have profound consequences for the Americans, the Oneida, and the Iroquois Confederation.  James Kirby Martin, one of the Revolutionary-era's leading scholars, joins us to give the background to the Oneida's decision, in the first of two parts of a conversation on the Forgotten Allies:  the Oneida in the Revolutionary War, the subject of one of Professor Martin's many books. 

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December 20, 1777, the kingdom of Morocco became the first to recognize the United States of America as an independent and sovereign nation.  We talk with Anouar Majid, Director of the University of New England's Center for Global Humanities, and the Tangier Global Forum, about the long connections between Morocco and the United States.  Did you know that the only American historical site outside the United States is the Tangier American Legation Museum?  We discuss this and other issues with one of the leading scholars of the relationship between the United States and the Islamic World, and editor of the Tingis , and author of Freedom and Orthodoxy  and other works.  

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The institution of slavery impacted American foreign relations in significant ways from the Revolution to the Civil War.  Historian Steve Brady from the Columbian College of Arts & Sciences discusses these connections in his new book,  Chained to History:  Slavery and United States Foreign Relations to 1865.  He sits down to discuss these many connections, from Article 7 of the Treaty of Paris, to the Haitian Revolution, prohibition of the international slave trade in 1807, the War of 1812 and acquisition of Florida,  the Amphictyonic Conference in Panama, and the role of the Adams generations in the tangled history. 

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What better way to commemorate Patriot's Day than the discuss with award-winning author Bob Gross his inspirational study of Concord on the eve of the American Revolution, The Minutemen and their World:   50th Anniversary Edition. First published in 1976 and long considered a touchstone in historical study, and now in a revised and expanded edition, Gross's changed how we understand the experiences of one small town on the road to American Independence, and how history is researched, written and presented.  We also discuss Professor Gross's sequel, The Transcendentalists and their World, a community study of Concord in the era of Thoreau and Emerson.    

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The publication of Thomas Hutchinson's secret letters to London politicos outraged Massachusetts citizens, as Hutchinson advised the British establishment on how to suppress colonial dissent and insulted those who disagreed with British policy.  Ultimately, when it was learned that Benjamin Franklin had leaked the letters, Franklin's reputation was ruined in England, and he became an undisputed revolutionary.  But how did Franklin get the secret letters?  Jeremy Bell, author of three books on William Hogarth, joins us to unravel this 250-year old mystery, and tell us about Franklin as an associate of Sir Francis Dashwood and other members of the "Hell-Fire Club" one of many stories that Jeremy weaves in  "Ben Franklin's Sit-down Walking Tour of Boston," at the Bell in Hand.  He shares some of this, as well as other enduring questions, and tells us his own favorite dramatic portrayal of Franklin, was in "Sons of Liberty," with Dean Norris from "Breaking Bad" as "Bad Ass Ben."  

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George Washington's greatness is undeniable.  He gave his all not only to secure the independence of the United States, but to unite them.  He could not have done this without the love and support of his beloved wife Martha Washington.  She joined him on his military campaigns, and kept Mount Vernon functioning during the eight years General Washington was away.  Join us for a conversation with  Mrs. Washington,  back at Mount Vernon in April 1784, as portrayed by Sandy Spector.

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Eugene Procknow has written a biography of William Hunter--son of a British sergeant who spent his childhood and teen years accompanying the British army, was taken as a prisoner of war, became a printer and returned to America in the 1790s to edit a series of newspapers in Pennsylvania and Kentucky defending freedom of the press before becoming a Jacksonian political figure.  At some point Hunter sat down to write a memoir, which contains one of the few observations by a child of the war, as well as other episodes  of his memorable life, and Procknow has now published a biography, William Hunter:  Finding Free Speech:  A British Soldier's Son who Became an Early American.   
To help with his own research, Procknow has compiled a terrific bibliography of sources on the Revolution, available on his Researching the American Revolution website.

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From  1776 through the end of the war, Anthony Wayne was   at the forefront of a defensive line, or in leading the rear guard staving off a British attack on American forces.  Intelligent, stubborn, argumentative, bold and daring, Wayne also was a womanizer with a fondness for drink who semed to have lost the trust of Washington when, in 1791, the President entrusted him with building an army to maintain peace in Ohio after two American armies had already been devastated by Native American forces led by Litle Turtle and other warriors. Wayne was Washington's 16th choice for the assignment. We talk with  Mary Stockwell  author of Unlikely General: "Mad" Anthony Wayne and the Battle for America  about Anthony Wayne's unlikely career, and his fidelity to the cause of American liberty. 

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Benjamin Franklin was one of America's most famous citizens.  He was a printer, scientist, philosopher, diplomat, inventor, postmaster and a self-proclaimed lover of women.  Nancy Rubin Stuart  tells us about some of the women Franklin loved, in three countries and two continents, including his wife Deborah, Madame Brillon and Madame Helvetius, Margaret Stevenson and her daughter Polly, and Kitty Ray of Block Island, whose lives intertwined with Franklin's, and whose stories she tells in her new book,  Poor Richard's Women:  Deborah Read Franklin and the Other Women behind the Founding Father.  

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Though he didn't arrive in America until 1780, Major General Francois-Jean de Chastellux had a profound impact on the war's outcome and on the French-American relationship.  He also enjoyed a close personal friendship with George Washington, and as a French philosophe  was elected a member of both the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences.  Iris De Rode has discovered the Chastellux family archives (dating back to the 1300s) near her childhood home in France, and using this trove of documents has written a biography of the Marquis de Chastellux,   and is currently writing Military Enlightenment on the Ground (UVA Press, 2024) about France's intellectual generals in the age of enlightenment.

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